ReproZip is a tool aimed at simplifying the process of creating reproducible experiments from command-line executions. It tracks operating system calls and creates a package that contains all the binaries, files, and dependencies required to run a given command on the author’s computational environment. A reviewer can then extract the experiment in his own environment to reproduce the results, even if the environment has a different operating system from the original one.

Currently, ReproZip can only pack experiments that originally run on Linux.

Concretely, ReproZip has two main steps:

The packing step happens in the original environment, and generates a compendium of the experiment so as to make it reproducible. ReproZip tracks operating system calls while executing the experiment, and creates a .rpz file, which contains all the necessary information and components for the experiment.

The unpacking step reproduces the experiment from the .rpz file. ReproZip offers different unpacking methods, from simply decompressing the files in a directory to starting a full virtual machine, and they can be used interchangeably from the same packed experiment. It is also possible to automatically replace input files and command-line arguments. Note that this step is also available on Windows and Mac OS X, since ReproZip can unpack the experiment in a virtual machine for further reproduction.